Vote for the Top Virtualization Blogs of 2012

It’s hard to believe another year has gone by and it was only just over 12 months ago that I started writing this blog with a focus on Virtualizing Business Critical Applications, with Cloud and all things VMware Virtualization thrown in for good measure. This time of year is important because Eric Siebert runs the voting for the top virtualization blogs at vSphere-Land.com. Eric puts a lot of effort into this and it’s great that he has some good sponsors, which I hope you support. I missed out on the voting last time around so I’m hoping to make up for it this year, so if you appreciate what I do I’d appreciate your vote for the 2013 series (based on 2012 content). Votes must be placed by 1st March 2013 – (03/01/2013 or 01/03/2013 depending on how you like to look at it), so please get voting. I and many of the other bloggers put considerable time and effort into providing you, our readers, with information that we hope will make you more successful when deploying virtualization and cloud solutions and avoid any architectural traps and pitfalls. Below I’ll recap on what I got up to in 2012.

For me 2012 was a busy year and definitely characterized by two major themes. Firstly it was the year of the Cloud and Software Defined Datacenter (before the term was popular), not just due to hype, but due to real implementations of Cloud solutions in enterprise and service provider clients. Over the course of the year I was responsible for architecting 9 vCloud solutions, with 7 private clouds, and 2 which were for public cloud service providers. One of my favourite private cloud projects of 2012 included security and compliance (vShield App/Edge, vCenter Configuration Manager) integrated with Site Recovery Manager for DR. Secondly it was the year of Business Critical Applications and Unix to VMware Migrations (My company achieved The VMware Virtualizing Business Critical Applications Competency). I was responsible for architecting 3 Unix to VMware migrations, mainly Oracle Databases, one project with 80 business critical Oracle databases, one Oracle RAC on VMware, and another with around 200 Unix systems and applications including SAP, Oracle OBIEE, Oracle OSB, Web Logic and more.

I was fortunate to be invited to present at a number of events on my favourite topics. I attended my first VMworld USA in San Francisco, and that was followed by first VMworld Europe in Barcelona. I was hoping to get selected for a single session to present but was lucky enough to be selected to present 5 sessions instead. It was a great experience and was great to meet so many great people. I also presented at VMUG Singapore, vForum in Singapore, at vForum Sydney and helped out on a couple of VCDX Bootcamps. A top highlight was co-presenting various different sessions at these events with many of my fellow VCDX colleagues. I greatly appreciate all of you who attended my various presentations and rated them so highly, I’m going to be trying to repeat the success at events this year.

I think it’s important to give back to the virtualization community that has given so much to me. This is why I spend as much time pro bono (~55 working days equivalent in 2012) as I do on my blog and helping people who write to me. It’s a great value and learning tool for me at the same time as well. I get a lot of inspiration for my writing from you and from my customers. Over the course of 2012 this inspiration generated around 70 articles in my spare time (usually in the late evening / early morning). A lot of them were quite long and detailed, but I hope that you got value out of them even if they sometimes do take a bit to digest. Like Duncan Epping (pretty sure there is no doubt he’ll retain his #1 spot as top blog for yellow-bricks.com) has done in his blog wrapping up 2012 and the top blog voting I thought I’d list the most popular articles on longwhiteclouds.com from 2012.

You can be assured there will be a lot more great content where that came from as we progress through 2013. I think 2013 will shape up to be an exciting year, I certainly have some announcements to share shortly. Lets see what happens, but I think Software Defined Datacenter will mature more, this may finally be the year of End User Computing and maybe even Hybrid Cloud.

I hope you consider voting for Long White Virtual Clouds and the other great blogs out there. As always your feedback is welcomed and I look forward to seeing many of you at upcoming events. Also I’m always happy to receive suggestions for new blog posts. I keep a list of ideas for blog articles and I’d be happy to add to it (currently sits at around 50 ideas).

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About the Author

Michael is Technical Director, Business Critical Applications Engineering at Nutanix. He has been using VMware products since 1998 and has been deploying ESX solutions since 2002. He specializes in designing virtualization solutions for Unix to Linux migrations, business critical applications, disaster avoidance, and mergers and acquisitions. Michael has been in the IT industry since 1995 and consulting since 2001. Michael is Nutanix Platform Expert (NPX) #007. In addition to VMware Certified Design Expert (VCDX) he holds VCP, VCP-Cloud, VCAP-DCD, VCAP-DCA, VCAP-CID, VCAP-CIA, ITIL Foundation, MCP I, and MCSE (NT4 – 2K3).

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The views expressed anywhere on this site are strictly mine and not the opinions and views of VMware or anyone else. All content is provided without any form or warranty explicit or implied, for informational purposes and for use at your own risk.